The Great
Places Awards recognize professional and scholarly excellence in
environmental design, paying special attention to the relationship between
physical form of the built environment and human activity or experience. Each
year, EDRA assembles a jury with diverse backgrounds in design, research, and
practice. The jury evaluates how projects across disciplines, attend to the human experience of well-designed places. This year's jury selected exceptional submissions from the
categories of “place design,” “place planning,” as well as two book awards.

Visitors of all ages enjoying one of the wetland features of Kiryat-Sefer Park in Tel Aviv.

Kiryat-Sefer Park was built on a 1.2
hectare parking lot in the center of Tel Aviv. This park was the result of 15
years of a community campaign against the building of a high rise residential
complex on this site. The planning process included public participation over a
span of two years with a multitude of stakeholders from different
constituencies, followed by a year-long construction process.

Kiryat-Sefer park is designed on the
theme of an ecological and democratic park. The ecological feature includes
several nature-related experiences like the delineation of the water cycle, a
spring and stream flowing through open grounds and a wetland with biofilters. The democratic aspect is reflected in the community engaged planning/design
process as well as the inclusion of a variety of spaces than can support varied
activities, and different user groups. The park has become a meeting place for
different groups in Tel Aviv and is a haven in the middle of Tel Aviv. (Click here to watch a video on the life of the project.)

The CPL150 Community Vision Plan's Group 2 Report includes recommendations for four branch communities

CPL 150 represent the planning
process between the Cleveland Public Library (CPL) and a professional design
practice to develop a Community Vision Plan for 13 of Cleveland Library’s 27
neighborhood branches. The plan sought to revitalize the neighborhood branches.
It did so by recognizing that each neighborhood is unique and will need
specific strategies to succeed. CPL150 represents the combined strategy for
determining these neighborhood-specific needs, identifying opportunities, and
building consensus among disparate user groups around what their local
libraries can and should become.

The design team envisioned the
branch experience in terms of four experience levels: building; grounds; neighborhood;
and services. The planning process included public meetings, open houses,
advisory committee meetings, targeted focus groups with youth and seniors and a
widely distributed multilingual survey. Over three years, the design team
produced detailed recommendations for each of the 13 branches, collected in
four reports. Recommendations spanned design scales, including ideas for
interior reconfiguration, architectural improvements, neighborhood
connectivity, and system-wide services. As of 2018, after a successful public
levy, the CPL is moving forward with their overall Branch Revitalization plan
with CPL150 at the forefront.

Design as Democracy offers a fresh
look at the approaches and tools designers are using to create places with the
people who inhabit them. The book is at once about collaboration and also a
product of collaboration. It is co-edited by six academics in landscape
architecture, architecture and planning, who research and practice place-making
through participation; but the book’s strength—like participatory design
itself—comes from contributions made by over 50 leaders and emerging voices in
the field.

The book starts with a deep
commitment to social justice and inclusion. The book’s nine chapters progress
chronologically, from predesign, to initial community engagements, through
identifying issues, problem solving, and collective making. The closing
chapters reinforce the need for prototyping, post-occupancy evaluation, and for
making the most of the political role that design plays. This book should have
broad impact in fostering more democratic approaches to place-making across the
design disciplines.

This book tackles the question, “How
can the neighborhoods and districts where people live, work, and socialize be
made healthier through planning and design?” Drawing on empirical research,
conceptual frameworks about how health should matter, and the body of
professional and research knowledge about the planning and design process,
Creating Healthy Neighborhoods, creates an evidence-based approach to both the
process and substance of creating healthier places.

Structured around eight central “big
ideas” or principles (importance, balance, vulnerability, layout, access, connection,
protection and implementation); it provides a framework for thinking about the
intersections between environments and health. The book makes 20 specific
propositions that identify more specific areas of intervention. Proposing 83
concrete actions, it categorizes these by level of certainty—directly from
research, informed by it, or general good practice. By engaging the complex
interactions between health and environments for different kinds of people, as
well as the process of making places healthier, it points toward more nuanced
treatment of this issue in the future.